Spring Bank Holiday

Because The Better Half’s (TBH) birthday falls around that time, we often go out for a short outing during the bank Holiday weekend and this year we went to Broadway. No, not that one, this one is a small town in the Cotswolds with a high street full of antique shops and restaurants offering everything from a full meal to cream tea.

A Typical view of Broadway

The reason TBH wanted to go there was to look for some brand of clothing which is found only in a very few actual shops and she knew there was one there. There is no substitute for trying something on in a shop. With internet shopping, although convenient for many things, you can only try on clothes by the long process of receiving the garment trying it and returning it by post if it does not fit and waiting for the replacement. A process that can take a week or more. So cut out all of the posting back and forth bit and go to a shop. QED We had already had a celebratory meal at TBH’s favourite Italian, Fabio’s and having indulged in a very large and very nice meal we did not need much to eat that day and certainly needed to do a bit of walking to remove the extra calories we had taken on board.

One of Britains useless signposts passed on the way

The weather was not the best for wandering around, because it was not very sunny and the wind seemed to have come directly from the Artic, but we stoically did the tourist thing having first visited the shop and acquired the new clothes desired by TBH.
One of the attractions in the area is Broadway Tower. This is one of those odd towers you find around the British countryside known as a folly. Many were built a long time ago in response to the French Revolution of 1789, although some are much more recent and really are a folly. The original towers were generally declared to be a fashionably foible of the extremely rich in order to prevent the peasants from finding out their real purpose. The idea was that if a revolution broke out in the local area, these towers could be used as a means of rapid communications. By having the towers as high as possible a beacon on the tower could be seen from a long distance. They could then use the tower signal a warning to the other nearby landowners that the feared pitchfork army was on the rampage. They there was never any great risk of revolution, but the towers were built nonetheless and now work well as tourist attractions.

The Broadway Tower

Broadway Tower was completed in 1798 designed by Capability Brown and George William 6th Earl of Coventry with the help of the architect James Wyatt. The view from the top of the tower is quite spectacular, overlooking much of the Cotswolds as it does, but it was so cold, TBH decided to stay in the car whilst I took a very quick look around with my camera at the ready.

There are several things to see inside the tower

I did not go up the tower, since it would have meant that TBH would be sitting alone in a car for a long time on her birthday outing, so I raced over to the tower, took a few shots and raced back. One notable event was that there must have been a wedding nearby because there was a bride and groom all dressed in their wedding gear being photographed by a professional photographer who was using the tower as a background. The poor woman must have been freezing, because she had a low cut wedding dress and nothing over her shoulders or back and the wind was bitter.

 In a field next to the tower were some deer of a kind that I do not recognise. They were obviously domesticated and were grazing in an enclosed field, unlike many deer that are usually free to roam, at least over the large area of a private estate. Looking across the open landscape you can always see bright yellow fields of rape seed, which are grown extensively around our region and no doubt elsewhere in the country. In fact on the journey out and back, you could hardly travel a mile without coming across another yellow field.

Thew view from the ground outside the tower. Plenty of yellow fields.

This made me wonder what happens to all this rape seed. I know that you can buy bottles of rape seed oil for cooking and it is supposed to be better for you than any other kind of cooking oil. In the supermarkets, this kind of oil is very expensive compared to other kinds of cooking oil. This despite the obvious fact that we seem to be growing the stuff in huge quantities judging by the amount of yellow fields we encounter at this time of year. What kind of yield does a farm get per hundred acres? In North Dakota, they were reported to be getting around a hundred gallons of oil per acre. That is not imperial gallons, so under one hundred over here and we may have better farming conditions than ND, which suffers much longer colder winters. I have not found any figures for the UK, but considering that it looks like half the countryside is growing the stuff, what makes the price so darn high?

More yellow on the way home

Anyway, just another little moan to add to my reputation as an old curmudgeon.

May Day

May Day lived up to its expectations of spring this year.  It was warm and sunny and being close to The Better Half’s (TBH's) birthday she chose a day out in her old home ground of the five valleys in Gloucestershire.

First we went to the Edgemoor Inn at Edge and ate lunch overlooking the Painswick valley, with the town of the same name in the distance.

Painswick on the other side of the valley.  The church has a very distinctive steeple, right of centre
Click to enlarge any picture

Now and again a large buzzard would fly past, low down in the valley, but never staying in view long enough for a photo.

After lunch, we went to St Mary’s church in Rodborough and looked for TBH’s grandfather’s grave.  She recalls his death and going there for the funeral in 1963 when she was a teenager.  

 We had no difficulty finding the grave, but TBH discovered that her grandfather had a sister and she, along with her grandmother have been buried in the same plot.   TBH had not known about his sister, her great aunt, who had died in the 1930s.  Another name to add to the family tree.

The ground slopes a lot and the graves are on narrow terraces.

   

St Mary's Church

 The graveyard overlooks the Stroud valley and almost dead centre of this picture, her old school is still there.

From there we went up onto Rodborough Common for a walk in the sunshine.  If you are not familiar with this area, it is one of the more interesting places to visit if you are ever in the Cotswolds. 

The common is quite high as hills go in England and this open area overlooks the Stroud valley and Stroud itself  on one side, the Severn valley with the Welsh hills in the distance to the west.

Whilst the sun was hot in the valleys, up on the top of the common, the wind was brisk and cool enough for TBH to need another layer.

 

Taking advantage of the breeze, a young man was flying some Japanese style kites he had just received an hour before, so he told us,  from a mail order company.  He competes in kite festivals and was getting ready for the forthcoming Weymouth festival taking place over the May bank holiday weekend.

 

His newest kites were quite spectacular and I could imagine the sight of hundreds of such things flying over the beaches at Weymouth. 

On one edge of Rodborough Common is a Fort built 1764.  It is not an ancient defensive building, but  was built as a ‘folly’ and is used as a residence.  In  1886 it was extensively rebuilt in a grander style.

 

Rodborough Common and the nearby Minchinhampton Common are renowned for the rare wild flowers and orchids that grow there.  There were the usual cowslips and daisies and several patches of anemones, but nothing else.  

On many occasions we have driven past these two commons and found them both carpeted with yellow dandelions, but this time, despite every grass verge in our local area being covered in them, there was not one.  

Dandelions nearer our home

 We can only assume that the commons being a lot higher than our home, the weather has not warmed up as much up there.

Today was the hottest day of this year so far and we went on a short trip and we had another day out in the sunshine.  I took some more pictures of the Cotswolds and I have added some of them to this May Day post.

  This is Fosse Way, an ancient Roman road that runs through the heart of the Cotswolds

Who says Roman roads are straight!  This one bends down a long way before climbing up the other side of Fossebridge.

This is one of the tributaries of the river Thames, which is not too far away.  

That is it for the time being.

Kaybee’s visit ammended version - for Saff

As some of my regular blog readers may already know, Kaybee and I are cousins and we have just had a great time with cousin Kaybee staying with myself and The Better Half (TBH) here in the UK.

For much our lives, although we had known each other as children, we had little contact with each other having gone our separate ways.

Kaybee and Snafu on the beach at Flamborough Head Yorkshire UK

It was only really with the advent of the Internet, that we have been able to locate each other and we have been catching up with our respective lives for some time now. We had visited Kaybee twice in Canada and now it was our turn to have her stay with us here.
Kaybee was flying into Heathrow, which is about an hour and a half from our home on a good day, so I had arranged to drive down and collect her.
I have a some trouble holding on to dates and deadlines and have had this problem all my life, so after an inadvertent practice run the day before she should arrive at Heathrow, I went there again on the actual day she had told me she was arriving.   I had actually printed out the email with the flights and times, so I really did not have any excuse, but this inability to retain dates has led me into trouble from time to time and I have gone places on the wrong week. I even went to a job interview a fortnight late once. Funnily enough I did not get that job.

Before Kaybee set out for England, and after some discussion with her and reassurances from me that her laptop would work on UK voltage and she could link into my Wi-Fi easily, she brought along Sheba (her Toshiba notebook) confident in the knowledge that she would be able to stay on line throughout her visit.
As soon as she had arrived, the Internet service to my house dropped out. After doing all the right things, it came on for an hour or two and then dropped out again for the entire next day.
This went on for most of the week, whilst I raised my blood pressure choosing number options and being recorded for training purposes. This delightful task of convincing my Internet Service provider that, ‘really truly, cross my heart and hope to die if I was lying’ I had a real problem, had to be fitted in between our planned schedule of outings that TBH and I had organised, for taking Kaybee around the parts of the Cotswolds that she had not seen before.

Country towns
Our first outing was a tour of two of the local country towns, Malmesbury and Tetbury.  Both of these towns are built on a hill and have some really quaint houses and scenery surrounding them.
In Malmesbury there is an ancient Abbey, consecrated in 1180 it is now only about one third of its original size, but still in use as the parish curch.  Over the centuries it was allowed to decay until part of the major structure collapsed about two hundred years ago.  The remaining building is just one part of a structure with a floor plan that formed a cross shape with a central tower. The remaining nave being the only habitable part of the original abbey.

Part of the missing tower and the blocked off archway which allows the single remaining nave to be  occupied

The cross in Malmesbury

The Five Valleys
Following this we travelled around the part of Gloucestershire where TBH hails from. We drove around Stroud and the Five Valleys, which took us past views of steep wooded and farmed valleys and wonderful views across the River Severn valley to the distant hills of Wales beyond.

A cotswold gatehouse 

Painswick, one of the towns of the five valleys

A view from Minchinhampton common

The view across Gloucestershire, the Severn valley with the River Severn
snaking through it to Wales on the far side.

All this scenery viewing makes for a good appetite, so this particular tour included a visit to the Weighbridge Inn, famous for its 2 in 1 pies. These are a large pie dish filled with a vegetable in a rich sauce in one half and a pastry capped meat or fish filling in the other. The pastry is not that ghastly fluffy stuff that most shop pies have, nor yet a soggy shortcrust but a perfect in between melt-in-the-mouth shortcrust. Should you find yourself in the vicinity, be warned, these pies are not something one should indulge in too often if you wish to keep wearing the same size clothes, particularly if you go for the full size ones, but much too good to miss should you have just, co-incidentally, been passing around that way at about lunch time.

A 'Mini' 2 in 1 pie. (Half size)

Bath
On another day we went to Bath and had a look at this fascinating Regency town, which of course has to include the famous Royal Crescent.

The much filmed Royal Crescent, scene of many a period drama 

A mature tree graces the centre of Abbey Green

Poultney Bridge, Bath

The weir on the River Avon

 Bath is known for the buskers that perform in the central areas around the Roman Baths and in front of the Abbey.

This busker seems to be playing a musical flying saucer. 

Bath Abbey, similar in style to Malmesbury Abbey in design, but complete

Snowshill Manor
Our last outing was to Snowshill Manor, the home of a cluttered and rather random collection once belonging to an old British eccentric Charles Wade. He had filled his house with so many treasures that he lived in an outhouse and eventually donated them, house and all, to the National Trust for posterity, a short time before his death.

Charles Wade in the 1950s, from a photo displayed in the Manor

The steep steps are the entrance to the small living area Charles Wade and his wife occupied at the Manor

This Manor house is in the Village of Snowshill deep in the Cotswolds with enviable views out of his bedroom and bathroom windows that must have greeted him each morning.

The view from his bathroom window

There are quite large orchards in the grounds and I have not seen quite so many apples in fruit on a tree for a long time. A portent of a hard winter, according to the old wives tale.

Apples galore

Snowshill Manor with one of the orchards in the foreground and Charles Wade's living quarters on the left

A typical part of the collection on display showing one of the magnificent cabinets behind the smaller treasures.

A room full of antique musical instruments

On the fourth day of Kaybee’s visit, I had to give a prearranged talk to my local U3A group, which I could not avoid and so on Monday I went to get some files off my main computer, when the hard disk I use for current work in progress, died quietly. This was only an inconvenience because I had backed up my work and was able to find it and finish it before the talk.
I always have a minimum of two hard drives in my computer, one for the Operating system and system files and one for storing my work files. I am a bit paranoid about backups, so on this PC, I have also fitted two further disks just used for regular backups. I had a suitable spare disk in a drawer which could take on the role as my work disk, so was able to take out the dud disk and return the PC to its normal state which got me to bed at just gone midnight.

After many phone calls, over a number of days, number choosing and much seriously distorted monophonic waiting-for-the-operator canned music I had managed to get my Internet Service Provider to restore the Internet service.
After this triumph, I wanted to get some family photos to show Kaybee, which were stored on my second computer, only to have flames coming out of the back, followed by dead silence as it passed on to the great data bus in the sky.
This was a nuisance, but not yet a disaster, I still had my restored main computer, although none of the photos  I wanted were on it, but as soon as I started to use this PC, it had also decided to commit hara-kiri in sympathy. So now there were no working PCs at all.

One dead PC, another undergoing open heart surgery

This turned out to be easy to solve since I had disturbed a cable inside it when I had fitted the replacement disk drive and so after a little head scratching, it was working again although Windows needed to ‘restore-the-last-known-good-session’. Once working again it complained about the unexpected shut down and went off looking for a cure for me. I laughed at this, thinking that Artificial Intelligence is not so smart, the loose wire had caused the shutdown – I thought.
I soon stopped laughing when halfway through some work, the PC blue screened and needed another Windows Recovery to restore a working version. Something else was wrong.
It ran all the next day and then blue screened again, once more needing to go through the recovery process in order to reboot. I realised that something else was seriously wrong this time, so I thought a bit and remembered having this symptom once long ago with faulty RAM. So using the memory from my still dead second PC, changed over the memory sticks and it started working again and has been ever since, so a kind of happy ending after all.
My dead media PC is much more troubled and will need to be rebuilt entirely, so I have bought a new power supply module and I need a motherboard, some more memory and possibly a new CPU. Windows does not like major changes to the hardware, since the Microsoft licence is tied in to the hardware. This means that I will need to buy more MS Windows to run the repaired hardware. Wonderful people Microsoft, when you consider that they achieved the preeminent position in the world markets with very little licence protection. Now they bludgeon us honest users with annoying and expensive restrictions, whilst they are still being ripped off in the less scrupulous nations of the world and appear to do nothing about it. TANJ! (There Ain’t No Justice)

The rest of Kaybee’s trip was largely unaffected by this ongoing saga of micro misery and went well. We had time to look through oodles of family photos and played the game of I-think-that-one-is-whatsit’s-grandma together and chatted about family history.

On the last weekend of Kaybee’s visit, our second cousin (CG) and her daughter (SW) had been invited to stay so that they could spend some time with Kaybee.  They duly arrived on the Saturday very promptly.  It usually takes a little over two hours to drive from their home and they had promised to arrive at 9.30am, they were only a couple of minutes later than their stated time, which meant that they must have left home very early, which showed true dedication. Once settled in, we were able to chat about the family and get up to date with everyone’s news.  They were staying the night and returning home Sunday.

The mass of photographs that Kaybee and I had been viewing had come from CG’s grandfather, our uncle H, who had lived for most of his life, with his wife, CG's grandmother,  in his mother’s home until her death.  When the family home was sold, he had been able to retain some very old family treasures and photo albums.  Uncle H had also been a very keen photographer and had amassed a huge collection of 35mm slides and printed photos he had taken, dating way back to his childhood, some of which he had entered into photographic society competitions and were prize winning entries.

CG and her daughter live in a fairly small house and so have little room for her grandfather’s stuff.  To save space, she had given the photos to me on the understanding that I would scan them and give her electronic copies.  I collected them in January and am still scanning pictures in October!   Uncle H had amassed thousands of slides.

There are not so many pictures left now but there are still three large 35mm slide boxes still to be sorted and scanned and CG tells me she may have some more in storage.  

These pictures have proved to be very interesting for genealogical purposes and some are very nostalgic for Kaybee and me, since there are many pictures of our grandparent’s house, a place we both loved dearly and which has many happy childhood memories for both of us.  

After an enjoyable visit, where we talked, played whatsit’s grandmother, played games on the Wii and generally had a great time, CG and SW packed up and started off in their car. 

This had been parked quietly on the one short stretch of straight road in our street since Saturday and as they started off, there was a loud bang as something burst under their rear wheel.  On investigation, it seems there had been an empty vodka bottle there.  It was made from very light glass, so did no obvious harm, but one cannot help but wonder if someone had left it there deliberately.   It is not something you normally see in our street, and was in just the right position to be broken as they drove away.   It has left me wondering what pond life would do such a stupid trick around here.

No one was hurt but we had to make sure no glass had stuck in the tyre before they could finally set off again.

The next day, and much sooner than it seemed that it should, the sad day dawned when Kaybee had to be taken back to Heathrow and arriving in good time, we had a final coffee and then we waved farewell as she went through the departures gate. It had been a great visit and we hope she can do it again another year.